Throughout the world, writing serves to express, record and even create meaningful moments. In academic spaces, writing becomes the bridge between ourselves and the world of ideas. In this course, we provide practical insights into how to write an academic essay. We show you how to develop the academic skills needed to be a competent academic writer. You will have an opportunity to engage with texts written by academics, and to see how some of the ideas in these texts are used by students in constructing an academic essay. We address some of the challenges these students face with respect to academic writing and offer you the opportunity to practice and to develop your own writing style. For this course, we centre our lessons around a specific topic - the concept of identity, since it forms such an important feature of how we locate ourselves in an ever-changing global world. In other words, this course teaches academic writing skills through getting you to write and reflect on your understanding of identity. So if you are thinking about studying at a tertiary institution, or if you just want to brush up on your academic essay writing skills, this course is for you!

从本节课中

Developing an argument: shifting identities

Week 2 further develops the concept of identity by considering the effects of mobility on one’s identity. Throughout history, as individuals moved across borders, they were either welcomed or perceived as an outsider or a threat. In South Africa during Apartheid, people within the country were further separated into ‘homelands’, and those who challenged the boundaries such as Nelson Mandela were labelled as criminals and terrorists. To help you formulate ideas on such concepts in your essay, we now consider the features of a good academic essay focusing on the introduction. We also introduce a three-part strategy to approach your readings: preview, overview and inview. The task for this week is drafting an introduction at university level. We identify key features of an introduction, then look at introductions written by our three student writers, and provide them with constructive feedback.